8 ms·

The article doesn't answer the question. The content can be summarised as "The Gmail app is 700 MB!"

simonw 10mo ago
Right! I was looking forward to some insight into what's in that thing, but there was nothing. Why IS the Gmail app 700MB?
- jshchnz 10mo ago
  Emerge Tools has an old thread on why it's actually so big: https://x.com/emergetools/status/1810790280922288617 https://x.com/emergetools/status/1810790280922288617
  - compiler-guy 10mo ago
    Non X version: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1810790280922288617.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1810790280922288617.html
  - giancarlostoro 10mo ago
    So is the extra space not accounted for from then to now AI related pieces?
  - simonw 10mo ago
    Thanks, that thread is great! They have a neat treemap breakdown here: https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail 130MB is localization data. This detail was interesting too: https://twitter.com/emergetools/status/1810790291714314706 https://twitter.com/emergetools/status/1810790291714314706 > There's over 20k files in the app, 17k of which are under 4 kB. In iOS, the minimum file size allocation is 4 kB, so having many small files causes unnecessary size bloat. Gmail could save 56.4 MB by moving their small files to an Asset catalog
    - trevor-e 10mo ago
      Yep, localization is a huge size bloat for enterprisey apps that support many locales. There is no Apple provided way to dynamically download select localization packs based on the device locale. Meta came up with their own solution: https://engineering.fb.com/2022/05/09/android/language-packs/ https://engineering.fb.com/2022/05/09/android/language-packs... The small filesize issue is something we commonly see in games, was surprised to see it for Gmail. And btw we open-sourced much of our analysis after being acquired by Sentry: https://github.com/getsentry/launchpad https://github.com/getsentry/launchpad
    - lynndotpy 10mo ago
      4kB is also the minimum file size on Linux, so I imagine a similar issue could exist on Android.
      - jeroenhd 10mo ago
        The Gmail app on Android is 150MiB in size. Android traditionally puts resources into a compressed archive, though, so by simply using an archive for storage, Google may be avoiding the 4k size problem.
    - tonyplee 10mo ago
      Wonder if it is better to create separate localized app download such as gmail-japanese, etc.
      - hn8726 10mo ago
        Google Play offers such functionality already, it's called App Bundles. Instead of uploading an entire APK, the developers can upload the app assets that get bundled into device-specific APKs containing only the resources necessary for the end device. So you'd only get native libs for your phone CPU architecture, translations for the device language and image assets matching the device resolution for example. In fact, I think it's mandatory now to use the app bundles format (but you're still free to configure it to some extent) I now see the article is about iOS app, but it looks like the Android app is anywhere between 50mb and 100mb (depending on the apk download side I look at) which is much more reasonable
  - jonny_eh 10mo ago
    Looks like it's mostly strings, probably due to localization. They should consider compressing each localization/language, and decompressing the needed bundle on first startup (or language change). Even better: Download the language bundle when needed.
    - Pxtl 10mo ago
      Well, that's a question for OS level. If the OS doesn't require the user to download the language and so language-switching to a new language is doable as an offline operation, I could see it being frustrating that switching to a new language must be done online. So compression/deduplication is probably the better option. Rather than storing as 1 zip per language, though, you'd probably want a compression format that also eliminates duplication that may occur between languages if you're storing all languages compressed on the system. That means you'd need compression to handle the entire language complex being in one massive compressed blob and you'd just extract out the languages you needed. I assume there are some forms of zipping that do this better than others.
  - thefilmore 10mo ago
    Author here. Thanks for sharing this. It seems they released an updated version of this analysis last year [1]. It matches what I saw when analyzing the IPA. I tried to do a deeper analysis on the code itself using several tools, including Google's own bloaty [2] which was not very useful without symbols, classdumpios [3] which revealed something like 50k interfaces starting with "ComGoogle", and Ghidra [4], which I left running for a day to analyze the binary, but kept hanging and freezing so I gave up on it. Perhaps comparing the Android and iOS code could lead to something more fruitful. [1] https://x.com/emergetools/status/1943060976464728250 https://x.com/emergetools/status/1943060976464728250 [2] https://github.com/google/bloaty https://github.com/google/bloaty [3] https://github.com/lechium/classdumpios https://github.com/lechium/classdumpios [4] https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra
Aperocky 10mo ago
The article is the question though, the question deserved to be asked. And Gmail deserve to be shamed for shipping almost a gigabyte of stuff for a mailbox. Wouldn't be surprised if they accidentally/intentionally built the whole youtube client in there.
- NuclearPM 10mo ago
  Deserves.
  - dieggsy 10mo ago
    It's quite common in UK English (and maybe others, I don't know), to refer to "singular" or collective non-people entities (such as companies, I know Gmail itself isn't one) using the plural form of verbs. This isn't in my natural speech, but I quite like it; it seems to kind of imply "the people behind [company]" rather than anthropomorphizing the company itself. ...generally though I think it's just colloquial convention and not that deep.
    - HPsquared 10mo ago
      I wonder how this language quirk changes how people think about the statement "a corporation is a person".
    - anal_reactor 10mo ago
      There's something funny about someone trying to be smart and pointing out a typo or some other minor irrelevant error only to be proven completely wrong.
      - WillPostForFood 10mo ago
        He isn't wasn't wrong, and the parent post wasn't even correcting him. Gmail is not a corporation, it is a product - singular.
        10mo ago
wolvoleo 10mo ago
There's a few other apps that are ridiculously big. Like the DJI Mimo app. It's an app I need for my DJI Mic, to change 4 settings on it. It needs 800MB for that which is absolutely ridiculous. Also I need to sign up for an account to use it even though the Mic works completely locally and it just changes the settings over USB. It's absolutely fucking ridiculous to have an 800MB app for this and the reason is just marketing. It's full of stupid videos promoting their stuff. And the account just causes stupid spam. I should have returned the damn thing to be honest. Ps pardon my french but I'm really annoyed about this and in this case it's warranted in my opinion. 800MB is ridiculous.
- rjh29 10mo ago
  Corsair iCUE. 1.1GB to control your RAM lights...
  - jason_oster 10mo ago
    Beautiful example of bloat. Bravo! The software crisis never ended. Instead, we also gained a hardware crisis.
    - rjh29 9mo ago
      I just uninstalled it and Windows reported it as 3.21GB, so it was larger than I thought!
  - encom 9mo ago
    >1.1GB >RAM lights I'm not sure which is dumber.
    - rjh29 9mo ago
      That's like saying Christmas lights are dumb. Each to his or her own though!
- HPsquared 10mo ago
  It doesn't inspire confidence in privacy when things are so huge, connected and opaque.
layer8 10mo ago
As usual, the answer to a question in the title is “no”. ;)
- achairapart 10mo ago
  Correct, as in Betteridge's law of headlines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...
bdhtu 10mo ago
It's not just Gmail. Most of the popular apps on iOS are literally 10x bigger than their Android versions. It's hard to find a popular iOS app that's smaller than an Electron app.
- pfortuny 10mo ago
  Then you look at the desktop backgrounds folder in your Mac and say: WHAT THE FUCK! There are 4k videos there... Just unbelievable.
  - QuantumNomad_ 10mo ago
    They use those videos on the lock screen for example. Not saying it’s a good idea that they ship all of those big video files. Believe me, my MBP M1 with 256GB SSD barely has space left even when I go and clean up various files I no longer need. Foolish as I was, I believed that doubling the amount of storage compared to the MacBook Air I had before it would leave me with plenty of space for years to come. In reality it did not take much time before I was using most of the storage available. So when I bought my latest iPhone not long after I bought that MBP, I opted for the iPhone model that has 1TB storage. And at least on my phone I consistently have a good amount of space left. Every couple of months I move pictures and videos from the phone to an external hard drive. So since it was only a week or so since last I moved pictures and videos from the phone, I am currently using 350 GB of storage on the phone. Out of those currently used 350 GB, just under 40GB is accounted for by music I have downloaded in the SoundCloud app, which is ok even though maybe a little bit silly on my part. I have it set to download all songs that I favourite, and I sometimes manually download whole albums and whole playlists. Not because I want to listen to all of it offline but so that when I am offline I still have a wide selection to choose from. For example on the occasion that I fly by plane once or twice a year. Another 20GB of storage space is used by maps I’ve downloaded in the Organic Maps app to have locally saved maps for various places I’ve been to or want to go to. Again, a little bit silly to keep that much map data even for the places that I am not going to visit for at least 6-12 months, and which will need to be updated again when I do go there to ensure I have up to date maps. But all in all, I can “afford it” with a terabyte total storage. And both the songs in SoundCloud and the map data is data that I could manually go through and delete as much of as I’d like to if I ever were in a pinch and needed to free up space. At times I will hoover around 700 GB of storage used on the phone if it’s been a while since I moved pictures and videos and I have filmed some longer videos. My phone being a few years old now however, it doesn’t have USB-C. So it takes a bit of time to move pictures and videos from it. Even if I transfer over the network it doesn’t seem much faster than USB 2.0, weirdly.
citizenpaul 10mo ago
I've noticed in general android apps have been shrinking in size for several years. I'm not sure if recent LLM trends are changing that again.
BatteryMountain 10mo ago
Biggest Google Apps for me: Gboard 247MB Google 415MB Google Play Services 1330MB Google Play Store 165MB Messages 321MB Gmail 233MB
- trinix912 10mo ago
  Holy... What kinda heavy lifting is Google Play Services doing with those 1330 megs?
  - ChoGGi 10mo ago
    Dunno but my userdata for play services is 623MB.
- anthk 10mo ago
  Instead of Gboard, get Anysoft keyboard from https://f-droid.org https://f-droid.org, enable Gestures in the settings. You'll thank me later. Also, F-Droid has different keyboard layouts for Ansyoft such as better ones for SSH and OFC language related layouts.
  - ThePowerOfFuet 10mo ago
    Futo Keyboard. https://keyboard.futo.org/ https://keyboard.futo.org/

simonw 10mo ago

Right! I was looking forward to some insight into what's in that thing, but there was nothing. Why IS the Gmail app 700MB?

jshchnz 10mo ago
Emerge Tools has an old thread on why it's actually so big: https://x.com/emergetools/status/1810790280922288617 https://x.com/emergetools/status/1810790280922288617
- compiler-guy 10mo ago
  Non X version: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1810790280922288617.html https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1810790280922288617.html
- giancarlostoro 10mo ago
  So is the extra space not accounted for from then to now AI related pieces?
- simonw 10mo ago
  Thanks, that thread is great! They have a neat treemap breakdown here: https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail https://www.emergetools.com/app/example/ios/com.google.Gmail 130MB is localization data. This detail was interesting too: https://twitter.com/emergetools/status/1810790291714314706 https://twitter.com/emergetools/status/1810790291714314706 > There's over 20k files in the app, 17k of which are under 4 kB. In iOS, the minimum file size allocation is 4 kB, so having many small files causes unnecessary size bloat. Gmail could save 56.4 MB by moving their small files to an Asset catalog
  - trevor-e 10mo ago
    Yep, localization is a huge size bloat for enterprisey apps that support many locales. There is no Apple provided way to dynamically download select localization packs based on the device locale. Meta came up with their own solution: https://engineering.fb.com/2022/05/09/android/language-packs/ https://engineering.fb.com/2022/05/09/android/language-packs... The small filesize issue is something we commonly see in games, was surprised to see it for Gmail. And btw we open-sourced much of our analysis after being acquired by Sentry: https://github.com/getsentry/launchpad https://github.com/getsentry/launchpad
  - lynndotpy 10mo ago
    4kB is also the minimum file size on Linux, so I imagine a similar issue could exist on Android.
    - jeroenhd 10mo ago
      The Gmail app on Android is 150MiB in size. Android traditionally puts resources into a compressed archive, though, so by simply using an archive for storage, Google may be avoiding the 4k size problem.
  - tonyplee 10mo ago
    Wonder if it is better to create separate localized app download such as gmail-japanese, etc.
    - hn8726 10mo ago
      Google Play offers such functionality already, it's called App Bundles. Instead of uploading an entire APK, the developers can upload the app assets that get bundled into device-specific APKs containing only the resources necessary for the end device. So you'd only get native libs for your phone CPU architecture, translations for the device language and image assets matching the device resolution for example. In fact, I think it's mandatory now to use the app bundles format (but you're still free to configure it to some extent) I now see the article is about iOS app, but it looks like the Android app is anywhere between 50mb and 100mb (depending on the apk download side I look at) which is much more reasonable
- jonny_eh 10mo ago
  Looks like it's mostly strings, probably due to localization. They should consider compressing each localization/language, and decompressing the needed bundle on first startup (or language change). Even better: Download the language bundle when needed.
  - Pxtl 10mo ago
    Well, that's a question for OS level. If the OS doesn't require the user to download the language and so language-switching to a new language is doable as an offline operation, I could see it being frustrating that switching to a new language must be done online. So compression/deduplication is probably the better option. Rather than storing as 1 zip per language, though, you'd probably want a compression format that also eliminates duplication that may occur between languages if you're storing all languages compressed on the system. That means you'd need compression to handle the entire language complex being in one massive compressed blob and you'd just extract out the languages you needed. I assume there are some forms of zipping that do this better than others.
- thefilmore 10mo ago
  Author here. Thanks for sharing this. It seems they released an updated version of this analysis last year [1]. It matches what I saw when analyzing the IPA. I tried to do a deeper analysis on the code itself using several tools, including Google's own bloaty [2] which was not very useful without symbols, classdumpios [3] which revealed something like 50k interfaces starting with "ComGoogle", and Ghidra [4], which I left running for a day to analyze the binary, but kept hanging and freezing so I gave up on it. Perhaps comparing the Android and iOS code could lead to something more fruitful. [1] https://x.com/emergetools/status/1943060976464728250 https://x.com/emergetools/status/1943060976464728250 [2] https://github.com/google/bloaty https://github.com/google/bloaty [3] https://github.com/lechium/classdumpios https://github.com/lechium/classdumpios [4] https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra https://github.com/NationalSecurityAgency/ghidra

Aperocky 10mo ago

The article is the question though, the question deserved to be asked. And Gmail deserve to be shamed for shipping almost a gigabyte of stuff for a mailbox. Wouldn't be surprised if they accidentally/intentionally built the whole youtube client in there.

NuclearPM 10mo ago
Deserves.
- dieggsy 10mo ago
  It's quite common in UK English (and maybe others, I don't know), to refer to "singular" or collective non-people entities (such as companies, I know Gmail itself isn't one) using the plural form of verbs. This isn't in my natural speech, but I quite like it; it seems to kind of imply "the people behind [company]" rather than anthropomorphizing the company itself. ...generally though I think it's just colloquial convention and not that deep.
  - HPsquared 10mo ago
    I wonder how this language quirk changes how people think about the statement "a corporation is a person".
  - anal_reactor 10mo ago
    There's something funny about someone trying to be smart and pointing out a typo or some other minor irrelevant error only to be proven completely wrong.
    - WillPostForFood 10mo ago
      He isn't wasn't wrong, and the parent post wasn't even correcting him. Gmail is not a corporation, it is a product - singular.
      - 10mo ago

wolvoleo 10mo ago

There's a few other apps that are ridiculously big. Like the DJI Mimo app. It's an app I need for my DJI Mic, to change 4 settings on it. It needs 800MB for that which is absolutely ridiculous. Also I need to sign up for an account to use it even though the Mic works completely locally and it just changes the settings over USB. It's absolutely fucking ridiculous to have an 800MB app for this and the reason is just marketing. It's full of stupid videos promoting their stuff. And the account just causes stupid spam. I should have returned the damn thing to be honest. Ps pardon my french but I'm really annoyed about this and in this case it's warranted in my opinion. 800MB is ridiculous.

rjh29 10mo ago
Corsair iCUE. 1.1GB to control your RAM lights...
- jason_oster 10mo ago
  Beautiful example of bloat. Bravo! The software crisis never ended. Instead, we also gained a hardware crisis.
  - rjh29 9mo ago
    I just uninstalled it and Windows reported it as 3.21GB, so it was larger than I thought!
- encom 9mo ago
  >1.1GB >RAM lights I'm not sure which is dumber.
  - rjh29 9mo ago
    That's like saying Christmas lights are dumb. Each to his or her own though!
HPsquared 10mo ago
It doesn't inspire confidence in privacy when things are so huge, connected and opaque.

layer8 10mo ago

As usual, the answer to a question in the title is “no”. ;)

achairapart 10mo ago
Correct, as in Betteridge's law of headlines: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headlines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge%27s_law_of_headline...

bdhtu 10mo ago

It's not just Gmail. Most of the popular apps on iOS are literally 10x bigger than their Android versions. It's hard to find a popular iOS app that's smaller than an Electron app.

pfortuny 10mo ago
Then you look at the desktop backgrounds folder in your Mac and say: WHAT THE FUCK! There are 4k videos there... Just unbelievable.
- QuantumNomad_ 10mo ago
  They use those videos on the lock screen for example. Not saying it’s a good idea that they ship all of those big video files. Believe me, my MBP M1 with 256GB SSD barely has space left even when I go and clean up various files I no longer need. Foolish as I was, I believed that doubling the amount of storage compared to the MacBook Air I had before it would leave me with plenty of space for years to come. In reality it did not take much time before I was using most of the storage available. So when I bought my latest iPhone not long after I bought that MBP, I opted for the iPhone model that has 1TB storage. And at least on my phone I consistently have a good amount of space left. Every couple of months I move pictures and videos from the phone to an external hard drive. So since it was only a week or so since last I moved pictures and videos from the phone, I am currently using 350 GB of storage on the phone. Out of those currently used 350 GB, just under 40GB is accounted for by music I have downloaded in the SoundCloud app, which is ok even though maybe a little bit silly on my part. I have it set to download all songs that I favourite, and I sometimes manually download whole albums and whole playlists. Not because I want to listen to all of it offline but so that when I am offline I still have a wide selection to choose from. For example on the occasion that I fly by plane once or twice a year. Another 20GB of storage space is used by maps I’ve downloaded in the Organic Maps app to have locally saved maps for various places I’ve been to or want to go to. Again, a little bit silly to keep that much map data even for the places that I am not going to visit for at least 6-12 months, and which will need to be updated again when I do go there to ensure I have up to date maps. But all in all, I can “afford it” with a terabyte total storage. And both the songs in SoundCloud and the map data is data that I could manually go through and delete as much of as I’d like to if I ever were in a pinch and needed to free up space. At times I will hoover around 700 GB of storage used on the phone if it’s been a while since I moved pictures and videos and I have filmed some longer videos. My phone being a few years old now however, it doesn’t have USB-C. So it takes a bit of time to move pictures and videos from it. Even if I transfer over the network it doesn’t seem much faster than USB 2.0, weirdly.

citizenpaul 10mo ago

I've noticed in general android apps have been shrinking in size for several years. I'm not sure if recent LLM trends are changing that again.

BatteryMountain 10mo ago

Biggest Google Apps for me: Gboard 247MB Google 415MB Google Play Services 1330MB Google Play Store 165MB Messages 321MB Gmail 233MB

trinix912 10mo ago
Holy... What kinda heavy lifting is Google Play Services doing with those 1330 megs?
- ChoGGi 10mo ago
  Dunno but my userdata for play services is 623MB.
anthk 10mo ago
Instead of Gboard, get Anysoft keyboard from https://f-droid.org https://f-droid.org, enable Gestures in the settings. You'll thank me later. Also, F-Droid has different keyboard layouts for Ansyoft such as better ones for SSH and OFC language related layouts.
- ThePowerOfFuet 10mo ago
  Futo Keyboard. https://keyboard.futo.org/ https://keyboard.futo.org/